I presume the organizers of the festival are very pleased with Rakatá’s production of Henry VIII. The Madrid-based theatre company managed to mobilise a significant portion of the Spanish-speaking community in London and a number of Spanish tourists, like myself, which occupied around three quarters of the house in the Wednesday afternoon performance and which practically sold out the venue on Thursday evening. Apart from some curious English speakers and a number of other Spanish accents I managed to identify, you could tell that Spain had been the home of a large part of the audience at some point in their lives. The nationality of the crowd was not only given away by the number of complaints about the insufficiently chilled beer and the amount of cigarette smoking at the interval but by the way the crowd enthusiastically applauded the catharsis of Spanishness that resulted from this production of Shakespeare and Fletcher’s play. That’s where I suspect the organizers will also be delighted, if with their choice of theatre company they expected a decidedly ‘Spanish’ take on the play.

On the page, away from the pressures of theatrical performance, Henry VIII allows for a wealth of overlapping and often contradictory readings. Instead, the Spanish company’s pragmatic antidote to the text’s ambivalences has been to streamline the performance by reordering, cutting, rewriting and even adding lines to transform Shakespeare and Fletcher’s Henry VIII into what perhaps should have more accurately been called The Tragedy of Katherine of Aragon. This does not only concur with a tradition of (heavily) rewritten Spanish performances of Shakespeare’s plays that dates back to the late eighteenth century, but the title of the only other production of Henry VIII by a Spanish company — Catalina de Aragón, by the theatre group La Carbonera (1965) — suggests that, however tentative, Rakatá’s production initiates a trend in the short Spanish performance history of the play. To the Spanish eye this should hardly be surprising, since Rakatá production relocates to the Globe the version of the story that has often circulated within Spanish culture, that is, the familiar tale of the hypocritical, womanising English ruler and the noble, self-sacrificing Spanish queen.

From that perspective Katherine becomes the unequivocally heroic character in the play at the timeliest of locations. In the whole of its performance history, I doubt Shakespeare and Fletcher’s Spanish queen has ever been delivered for an audience as ready to sympathise with her exiled condition as this one. The interpellation of the audience’s Spanishness felt especially powerful at those instances where Katherine depicted herself as a fragile alien in a court of strangers while, in order to render the heroic fall of the Spanish queen effectively, the rest of the main characters were, by contrast, articulated by an underlining of their most conflictive features and, especially, by the undermining of Henry’s credibility. Here, Rakatá followed the lead of the often contradictory passages written by Shakespeare and Fletcher, while at the same time taking a number of unexpected turns and choices that efficiently put the audience in the Queen’s pocket.

Thus, the King not only suffered from his early association with the predictably corrupt Wolsey but also ended up giving protection to Cranmer, champion of the Reformation in the English play, yet here unexpectedly played by Jesús Teyssiere as a sinister religious fanatic. In parallel, Henry’s despicable abandonment of the noble Spanish queen was only worsened by his nearly immediate marriage with Anne Bullen, whose overt sexuality contrasted with the Spanish queen’s temperance, and whose relationship with Henry was presented, in a rewritten and cleverly acted scene, as the result of her ignoble ambition to climb up the royal ladder. Even the final, triumphant birth of the guiltless Elizabeth I was largely ruined by creepy Cranmer, who held the baby up in the air while Queen Katherine delivered her dying words, saved by Rakatá for the play’s tragic ending, and which in Shakespeare and Fletcher’s Henry VIII are delivered at the end of act four.

This is only logical. Why should a Spanish audience like Elizabeth any better than Henry? And, after all, if Shakespeare and Fletcher tampered with historical accounts at their will in their dramatisation of the English past, why shouldn’t Rakatá intervene similarly in their staging of Spanish history? However one-sided, or precisely because of that, I am sure that this Henry VIII will interpellate other Spaniards almost as powerfully as it touched some of the ones exiled in London. In their appropriation of Shakespeare and Fletcher’s play, Rakatá have found a little treasure, that is, a restructuring of the play that gives ‘Spanishness’ a comfortable point of view from which to look at the stage. It worked like a charm, and I expect further success for this production. At the Globe, the audience cheered, clapped, whistled profusely, until the company came back onstage many, many times. Also, Federico Trillo, former Minister of Defence during the last conservative administration and now Spanish ambassador in London, just recently appointed by a new administration that promises to be at least as conservative, stood up from his seat, in ecstasy, in exactly point three seconds.

What do you think of this interpretation of Shakespeare? Add your thoughts to the discussion below!

To read more reviews of the performances and events that are a part of the World Shakespeare Festival, visit Year of Shakespeare.

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Want to know what other audience members thought of the production? Listen below to interviews with some of them:

Listen below to an interview with three members of the company, recorded by the Globe Education Department:

Here’s what others are saying about this performance:

[<a href=”http://storify.com/shakesinstitute/year-of-shakespeare-henry-viii” target=”_blank”>View the story “Year of Shakespeare: Henry VIII” on Storify</a>]

Author:Juan F Cerda

Dr. Juan F. Cerdá is Lecturer at the English Department of the Universidad de Murcia (Spain). He is part of the research project "Shakespeare in Spain within the Framework of his European Reception" (www.um.es/shakespeare) and he is currently Secretary of the European Shakespeare Research Association (www.um.es/shakespeare/esra).

One of things I’ve come to really respect about international directors of Shakespeare is their willingness to employ dramaturgical skills to present his plays in a fresh light (through cutting, re-ordering, merging together scenes…) whilst still managing to stay in touch with the themes and poetry which mark the essence of his work. (On a side note, it’s great to see that the British are steadily beginning to take such an approach to Shakespeare and other classics). I very much admired the way that this production re-crafted the text to offer us a version sympathising with Katherine. The actress’ performance was by far the strongest out of all the cast, and she very much succeeded, along with the revised text, to offer the audience a powerful Spanish re-telling of Shakespeare and Fletcher’s play. It was only fitting that Katherine’s plight ended the production.

This is just one of a number of productions this year which have clearly shown the craft of the dramaturg, others being Aberg’s King John and Hytner’s Timon of Athens. If such a varied array of creatives are producing such interesting theatre as this, long may this collaborative teamwork continue.